My Personal Computer Setup 2018

I currently have a 2015 MacBook Pro and no desktop computer. I will be honest in saying that I have put less thought into my MacBook setup than I have into my iOS setup, but there is definitely still some organization. This article was requested by u/darbmobile on The Efficient Educator subreddit

Desktop

This is the easiest aspect of my computer to talk about because there is simply nothing there. Ok, that’s a lie, I have a few things on my desktop, however I also ran a script that hides everything on the desktop unless viewed from Finder. Here you can see a screenshot of my desktop (with the faces of me and my fiancé redacted for privacy) and a screenshot of the desktop director in Finder. There isn’t a lot on my desktop right now but I tend to take a lot of screenshots that I don’t want visually filling up my desktop but might need to stay there for a few days.

If you would like to hide all of the icons on your desktop without deleting them all you have to do is open the Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true

Hit Enter, and then type:

killall Finder

And then hit Enter again. Everything should now be hidden. If you ever want to reverse this you just follow this process again, changing the word true in the first command to false.

The Dock

Similar to my iPad setup (which I haven’t written about yet and likely won’t since it’s really just used for my job and not much else), I pretty much keep everything I use on even an intermittent basis in my dock. From left to right:
Finder
1Password
AirMail
Safari
Preview
Word
iTunes
Settings
Photoshop
Lightroom
Stickies
Bear
Fantastical
OmniFocus
Messages
Numbers

Finder

In terms of file organization, there isn’t much going on. I actually don’t really use my computer unless it’s for work. I have two jobs, one as a teacher and the other as a photographer. All of my work for school gets done on my school computer (a MacBook Air provided to me by my school), so none of that is on this machine. My photography is all organized in Google Drive folders that are sorted by a 6-digit date indicator (MMDDYY) and the name of the subject. I then separate them into 2 folders, one called RAW which is where I put the images that are straight out of camera, and then another called Final where I export the edited images.

Naming Conventions

I tend to name things on my computer as simply as possible. I use Spotlight Search a lot so if I’m searching for something in a year I want the name to be obvious so my first guess finds it and I’m not searching for it for a long time. So I don’t really have any mind-blowing tips in this area.
I wish I had more to say about how I organize my computer but as I said earlier, of all of my machines (MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhone 6s, iPhone X, iPad Pro) I spend about 90% of my time on my iPhone X. Please feel free to ask questions either in the comments below or on r/theefficienteducator if there’s anything I mentioned (or didn’t) that you have questions about.